Hive Products

The Idea

The good stuff!

Even though there’s not an uncontaminated environment anywhere on earth, it’s still possible to produce a healthy probiotic honey. Such a honey is impossible to produce using conventional beekeeping methods.

Other hive products like beeswax and propolis, are chemical sinks and require the best possible environment to produce an uncontaminated product.

The Details

Pure Honey?

Natural beekeeping is about more than just bees. Natural beekeepers gather hive products whose goodness and healthful qualities are intimately tied to the methods used to produce them. Natural products from natural beekeepers are the best hive products available.

Beekeepers have always known there’s a difference between the industrial commodity sweetener bottled and sold as honey, and fresh, natural honey from the hive. It tastes and smells different. And it affects the body differently as well. Fresh natural honey has healthful qualities missing in the processed stuff. Today, we know that fresh natural honey is a healthful living probiotic, both for bees and man.

Those probiotic properties are easily lost by heating, filtering and during long term storage. These are standard practices in the commercial honey sector. And they are often emulated by conventional sideline and hobby beekeepers as well.

Natural is what all consumers expect their honey to be. And it’s what most beekeepers want as well. Yet, there’s a big disconnect between the methods most beekeepers use to get honey, and how they think about and market it. It’s as if honey has some intrinsic, magic ability to transform itself from today’s agricultural commodity to the pure, natural sweet medicine of the past.

But honey isn’t magic. And whatever goes into the hive will certainly come out with the hive products. Did you know that hive products are now being routinely monitored for pesticide levels by our the USDA? And for good reason. Researchers have found significant levels of pesticides, in hive products, while looking for the causes of Colony Collapse Disorder. Some of the contamination found was beyond allowable limits. Yes, there are allowable limits for pesticides in honey!

And much of it originated with improper or illegal pesticide use inside the hive. Yes, hive products are mostly contaminated by beekeepers putting stuff into their beehives that shouldn’t be there.

So much for honey’s inherent healthy qualities. So much for pure! Today, honey is a bulk agricultural product with allowable pesticides. Maybe that’s why some countries, who know what honey is, won’t allow USA honey imports!

But if you want pure, natural, sensual, probiotic honey, you’ll have to run your bees in a natural way. And harvest/store your honey to preserve it’s probiotic nature.

Pollen – Propolis – Beeswax

Beeswax.

All of these hive products are a natural chemical sink. They attract environmental contaminants and soak up in hive pesticides like a sponge. Honey is actually kept cleaner by the fact that these hive products preferentially suck up the contamination. So, natural, with a big shot of organic’s environmental focus, is even more important with these items than it is with honey.

And these products shouldn’t be produced or consumed from hives run in a conventional manner as pesticides are routinely used.